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According to UK-based Bluesky, a prototype version of a website online platform has been launched that allows homeowners, solar installers and manufacturers, energy companies and government organizations to assess the suitability of individual properties for solar energy technology.

At Autodesk University 2014 held in Las Vegas in December, Joe Hedrick, Infrastructure Solutions Team Manager, IMAGINiT Technologies, spoke with GISCafe about how projects in general are becoming bigger, along with ever-increasing use of reality capture. IMAGINiT is a provider of software, training, support and services to design and engineering companies and Autodesk Authorized Reseller and Autodesk Training Center.

The InfraWorks 360 Model Builder cloud service allows users to select a city-scale area from a map of the world in order to generate 3D city models in minutes.

“Bigger datasets, more partners and consultants are involved,” said Hedrick. “We continue to see a huge increase in people looking for ways to manage data. We’ve had several contracts with the army where they are managing everything from facility drawings to various documents and spreadsheets. In addition, private and commercial engineering and architectural firms are looking for ways to share data and projects.”

IMAGINiT will sometimes have to build tools inhouse, but mostly they use Autodesk Vault for integrations and data storage. “Commercial firms may want to tie into accounting, and we have integrations into some of the popular accounting packages out there,” said Hedrick. “We’re in the middle of a big one for the government. We are using our system and then programmatically writing to the data tables that they have in place.”

A cheaper solution to integration and managing data is Autodesk’s Fusion A360, said Hedrick. “I think it will change how we manage data. It’s going to integrate very nicely into the design platforms and apps.”

With data management, Hedrick said the biggest challenge is the size of the models. “How do you share a model that could be several gigabytes? With one of the army projects, we’re talking about 3 TB of data. How do we share that information? With pure sizes, there’s not a great way to share that amount of information. This becomes particularly difficult when you incorporate scanned data into it.” Hedrick said it used to be hard to find anyone to embrace the cloud but now the government is beginning to embrace it and the security is better. The cloud holds a lot of promise for managing large datasets and is being offered as a service in the InfraWorks 360 Model Builder cloud service.

We’re almost at the end of the year and we’d like to hear from you, the readers, about what you think the most important geospatial advancements have been for 2014.

Esri CityEngine allows users to visualize both qualitative and quantitative impact of design scenarios, perfect for the integrative planning needs of those looking to develop vibrant, sustainable communities.

The notion of gaming and geospatial coming together has been explored for some time. Gaming simulation and GIS software provider GameSim Inc. announced a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency. (NGA). This agreement will give credence to GameSim’s 3D environment with standards and data created and validated by the NGA.

In 2013, GameSim, ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the 500 fastest growing companies in the U.S., introduced an innovative software product, Conform (gamesim.com/conform), which generates a 3D representation of an environment from GIS data (vectors, elevation, and imagery) in near real-time. The integrated scene can be viewed in both 2D and 3D, or exported, into other run-time formats.

GameSim was interested in furthering their process of fusing together a single 3D environment by supporting additional data products (e.g., LiDAR, OTW video, and thermal video), to create a more accurate and rich 3D environment, while still maintaining near real-time performance. GameSim had previous experience working with these formats. The agreement with NGA through CRADA will provide the company with proper standards and data validated by NGA. In addition, GameSim and NGA will research the creation of a low bandwidth, browser-based visualization of that fused environment, according to GameSim company materials.

“We are creating a product that can fuse a variety of formats that adheres to established standards,” said Andrew Tosh, GameSim founder and president. “By collaborating with NGA it helps assure that GameSim produces a product that can meet the demands of the intelligence community, in terms of accessing their content and producing valuable visualizations.”

In a conversation with George Demmy, CTO of TerraGo, GISCafe Voice learned about the release of OpenGeoPDF technology, now available with TerraGo Publisher for ArcGIS, TerraGo Composer and TerraGo Toolbar.

Cities worldwide are charged with the same challenge: that of creating or retrofitting sustainable, intelligent infrastructure. Cities need the best in design, geospatial, visualization and analytical tools to realize a viable and intelligent city design. 3D City design is architectural design times thousands, plus it must have the ability to be interwoven with other surrounding infrastructure and foster an urban conversation.

Mike Detwiler was CEO and co-founder of SITEOPS prior to the acquisition. He is now vice president SITEOPS Product Development at Bentley. The office will remain in Charlotte, North Carolina, and the SITEOPS staff will be retained.

SITEOPS comes to Bentley with an impressive list of engineers, developers and land planners working in the retail, real estate and AEC industries. Says Rogers, “We’ll continue to support our users and work with them to help take SITEOPS to the next level. Bentley and SITEOPS have highly complementary products, so we’re excited to add SITEOPS to our civil design product offerings.”

Says Detwiler, “Bentley has a global reach, which is going to benefit us tremendously.”

Rogers explained that Bentley didn’t have a site optimization technology that SITEOPS brings, which is breakthrough technology in the cloud. The addition of SITEOPS empowers site development professionals to move beyond engineering to optioneering, which enables the exploration of engineering alternatives and their costs.

In the “Utilities and Government” breakout session on Media Day at the Bentley “Year in Infrastructure 2014” event held in London last week, a number of Bentley executives spoke on various aspects of utilities and government, with new developments for 3D cities.

Bentley Year in Infrastructure 2014 Conference, London

The event showcases work being done with Bentley Systems’ software, with presentations by all the Be Inspired Award finalists for the year, topped off by a gala Awards ceremony on Wednesday evening.

Cyndi Smith, senior director of Application Advantage at Bentley, introduced speakers. Aidan Mercer, senior industry marketing manager for Government spoke on “Advancements in Government and Life cycle Management of Infrastructure.” He also spoke about “Advanced BIM for cities,” which includes the various BIM levels used in 3D cities: Level 1: 3D visualization and design; Level 2: performance improvements; Level 3: extending into the operations at the complete asset level and this contributes to a smarter city. He mentioned a really excited finalist in the BE Awards this year, the City of Eindhoven, a city that uses MicroStation, Descartes, ProjectWise, and Navigator in its development of new city infrastructure.

Know What’s Underground

Rachel Rogers, Applications Advantage for Civil, Geospatial, Hydraulics and Hydrology, announced Bentley Subsurface Utility Design and Analysis in OpenRoads will be available in early 2015, and will be a game changer in terms of knowing what’s underground.

The product automatically creates a 3D model and brings together the information needed, provides 3D modeling of all underground utilities, that you can readily update into your GIS database. This gives you a true picture of what’s underground.

One of the highlights is that you have visualization clash detection which can drive construction costs down.

Utility Industry with Cyndi Smith

An industry trend seen recently: convergence. “With the convergence of information technology and operations technology, some projects I’m seeing are bringing in engineering technology,” said Smith.